Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism

Simon Tormey,Jules Townshend

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446239247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

"Tormey and Townshend have succeeded not only in making accessible the notoriously evasive ideas of 'Post-Marxist' thinkers, they have begun the vital work of critically examining their contribution to Marx's project of overcoming capitalism."
- James Martin, Goldsmiths, University of London

"Excellent textbook - critical, challenging and thoroughly engaging!"
- Richard White, Sheffield Hallam University

"In language which is clear without being simplistic, Tormey and Townshend help readers think about ways to live ?with and without Marx? in the wake of Marxism's historical failures as well as its continuing relevance to life under globalizing capitalism."
- Mark Rupert, Syracuse University

Key Thinkers in Critical Theory to Post Marxism is a comprehensive introduction to perhaps the most key intellectual trend in contemporary critical theory. In jargon-free language, it seeks to unpack, explain and review many of the key figures behind the rethinking of the legacy of Marxism in theory and practice. Key thinkers covered include Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Laclau and Mouffe, Agnes Heller, Jacques Derrida, J rgen Habermas and post-Marxist feminism.

Each chapter covers a key thinker or contribution and thus can be read as a stand alone introduction to the principal aspects of their approach. Each chapter is followed by a summary of key points with a guide to further reading.

Underlying the text is also the central question: What is Post-Marxism? Instead of viewing Post-Marxism as an ideology, movement or tradition of theorizing, the authors advocate Post-Marxism as a loose appellation describing those who have problematised Marx's approach to understanding and challenging contemporary capitalism. As such the book also offers an engaging commentary on some of the key political developments of our time including, for example, the anti-globalisation movement.

Key Thinkers in Critical Theory to Post Marxism provides an ideal introduction to a hitherto complex subject and will be essential reading for students of contemporary social and political inquiry.

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Cornelius Castoriadis: Magmas and Marxism

[W]e have arrived at the point where we have to choose between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionaries, between faithfulness to a doctrine that, for a long time now, has ceased to fuel either reflection or action, and faithfulness to the project of a radical change of society, which demands that we first understand what we want to change and that we identify what in society truly challenges this society and is struggling against its present form. (Castoriadis, 1987: 14)

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Cornelius Castoriadis would have been horrified to be regarded as a ‘Post-Marxist’ on any definition of the term. As he made clear in a number of essays towards the end of his life, ‘post’ theory meant resignation, despair, impotence (Castoriadis, 1997: 32ff.). It meant accepting the given, the limitations of the critical imagination and capitulation in the face of superior ideological forces. Castoriadis was, by contrast, a self-styled militant, temperamentally, theoretically and most of all politically. This in turn meant being hostile to ideas that are complicit in the continuation of hierarchy and subordination, whether under the aegis of capitalists or communists. Nevertheless there is an important sense in which Castoriadis shares, if not the political conclusions, then certainly the basic premise that animates others considered in this book. This is to say that he considered Marxism the major intellectual, theoretical and political project of his age, but also the major obstacle to the development of forms of critique and political engagement that could advance the project of creating an ‘autonomous’ society. This in turn meant having to engage continuously with the works of Marx, with the regimes founded by Marxists, with the efforts of Marxist groups to form the vanguard of revolutionary change. Marxism was not something he could leave behind; he could not ‘escape’ Marxism, except perhaps for those moments towards the latter part of his life when he was attacking the other great orthodoxy of the day, Lacanianism. Castoriadis’s radicalism was formed in and against Marxism, and it is from this point of view that it can be termed ‘Post-Marxist’. Quite apart from the possible family resemblance to others considered in this volume, consideration of Castoriadis’s unduly neglected work is also pressing from the point of view of those who remain sceptical about the development of a Post- or non-Marxist, yet radical politics. Unlike some of those considered here, Castoriadis did not give up Marxism to embrace liberalism or liberal-democracy. Rather he divested himself of Marxism in order to remain radical. Whether his work succeeds on these terms is another matter. But the point is that the thrust of Castoriadis’s rejection of Marxism stemmed from the view that the problem with Marxism was not that it was too radical, but rather not radical enough.

Castoriadis was born in Constantinople in 1922, though his family emigrated shortly afterwards to Athens where he was to remain until after the Second World War. Caught up in the radical left politics that flared during the war, he joined the powerful Greek Communist Party, but almost immediately had his doubts about its fidelity to the emancipation of the working class. Identifying initially with Trotskyism, Castoriadis quickly abandoned even that heterodox tendency for a libertarian communism that had something in common with the other great heterodox movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the Johnson–Forrest tendency. The young Castoriadis was passionate in his commitment to emancipation. Unusually, he was equally passionate in his hostility towards the Soviet Union, and the efforts of other radicals to accommodate the USSR within their own definitions of ‘progressive’ regimes. Castoriadis’s own group, Socialisme ou Barbarie [SOB], which broke from the Fourth International in 1948, was to be defined by this hostility to communist rule wherever it reared its head. SOB, which also counted among its number Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard, was to be a persistent thorn in the side of communist parties across the industrialised world in the 1950s and 1960s. Castoriadis himself produced a constant stream of articles and analyses sometimes under the pseudonyms, ‘Paul Cardan’ or ‘Pierre Chaulieu’ (Castoriadis, 1988a; 1988b; 1993). Many of these pieces were directed against the efforts of the USSR to impose its dismal vision of socialism on its ‘sphere of influence’.

Despite or because of the penetrating nature of its critique, SOB was dissolved in 1967 by its members, though many of its key terms and ideas were to be influential in the 1968 events in Paris, perhaps the quintessential ‘anti-bureaucratic’ revolt of the post-war period. In 1970 Castoriadis retired from his senior post as an analyst at the OECD, devoting himself to psychoanalytic theory and practice and the displacement of the baleful influence of Lacan in particular. The culmination of this critique was the original and highly demanding essay that makes up the core of The Imaginary Institution of Society (published alongside the earlier piece ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’). Up to his death in 1997, Castoriadis remained a forceful intellectual presence at conferences and colloquia around the world, where his robust defence of ‘self-management’ and ‘the self-instituting society’ served as a challenge to the baroque abstractions of rival approaches and thinkers. He was a prolific essayist, and in later years the concrete analyses of the travails of communism were conjoined and greatly enriched by many wide-ranging essays on a variety of topics. Many of these are collected in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, World in Fragments, and Politics, Philosophy, Autonomy. A further volume of otherwise unpublished articles and shorter pieces was collected in The Castoriadis Reader (Curtis, 1997), and a further set of essays written towards the end of his life appeared under the title The Rising Tide of (In)Significancy containing reflections with the same vigorous and militant spirit that marked his work of the 1940s. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of Castoriadis’s contribution together with an indication of its utility for emancipatory politics.

Rationalisation, bureaucracy and self-management

As already mentioned Castoriadis’s position was informed by his hostility to what Marxism had become at the hands of the ‘Marxists’, more specifically the Bolsheviks. In his view the promise of Marx’s work had been betrayed by Marxism in practice. The critique of Marxism thus moved from the concrete analysis of the forms and modalities of Marxism as a governing doctrine towards a critique of the theoretical and political premises of Marx’s work itself. Several themes are relevant in this early critique. The first and most obvious is Castoriadis’s characterisation of both capitalist and communist regimes as ‘bureaucratic’ thereby extending the Trotskyist critique of the USSR to advanced society as such. Castoriadis had studied the work of Max Weber extensively (he was one of the first translators of Weber’s work into Greek), and evidently took from him the correlation drawn between the process of modernisation and bureaucratisation, that is the proliferation of structures to maintain and administer social reproduction. This in turn necessitated a growing army of administrators, functionaries and bureaucrats to manage processes and operations on a scale that Marx could barely imagine.

As for Weber, so for Castoriadis such development equated to the suffocation of initiative and creativity in an ‘iron cage’ of instrumental rationality. The great difference is that whereas Weber’s analysis tended towards fatalism with respect to such developments, Castoriadis’s analysis remained critical and indeed optimistic, agreeing as he did with Marx’s analysis of the exhaustion of capitalism as a social system and the necessity for its overcoming due to the alienation it engendered (Castoriadis, 1988a: 101; 1988b: 92–3). Bureaucratisation was not in his view an insurmountable process that denuded humanity of the capacity to manage itself. It was a historically situated practice of domination like any other. On the other hand, it was one little understood by Marxists who clung obstinately to a mode of analysis that was, as far as Castoriadis was concerned, becomingly increasingly irrelevant. Marxism was a discourse of class polarisation, of industrial production and growing immiseration. Bureaucratisation under both capitalist and communist systems challenged these simplistic conclusions, and pointed to the necessity for a new analysis that broke with rather than developed Marxian categories.

Castoriadis documented the ways in which Marxian class analysis was being rendered defunct by the division of the world into those who manage and run the bureaucracy and those who are required to conform to its edicts. The former he termed ‘the directors’, the latter ‘the executants’ (Castoriadis, 1988a: 9), thereby echoing the ‘post-class’ analysis of James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution. To Castoriadis, the problem with class analysis is that it confounded ‘class interest’ with self-organisation, to disastrous effect. In the USSR a group claiming to act in the interests of the working class (the Bolsheviks) had taken power; yet the idea that this move equated with the working class taking power was clearly a fiction. Not only had the Bolsheviks eliminated the very institutions and organisations set up by the working class to manage their own affairs, namely the Soviets, but they had in effect placed themselves in an unchallengeable position – and all in the name of the working class. The feudal order had been replaced by a bureaucratic order run in the interests of the working class, but not of course by the working class. This ‘substitutionism’ mirrored the operation of the capitalist elites in the West, who under cover of elite-dominated ‘democratic’ institutions were able to promote themselves as ‘representatives’ of the people whilst at the same time ensuring that the working class remained subject to bureaucratically exercised control. In this sense Marxism had become an alibi for the disenfranchisement of the working class, rather than the means for its emancipation. The representative claim that underpinned the bourgeois revolution was mirrored in the vanguardism of a Leninist-inflected Marxism.

The line developed by Castoriadis in his early essays echoes the critique developed by Bakunin in his critique of Marx (Bakunin, 1872). It also chimes with that of Georges Sorel who in his essay ‘The Decomposition of Marxism’ had argued that Marxism had become an ideology of a theocratic kind (Sorel, 1968). As with Bakunin’s critique, a persistent theme in the work of the early Castoriadis is that the self-organisation of the working class must be both the means and the end of the revolutionary transformation of society. Any attempt to annex the will or activity of the working class to a party or movement separate from that class must be opposed. The working class cannot be represented; it cannot be ‘made present’ in terms of its own interests or some objective will conforming to the objective ‘line of march’ or deep-lying historical tendencies. Emancipation has to be self-emancipation, and management in a socialist society has to be self-management. Any other understanding would of necessity lead to the separation of those who manage from those who are managed and thus to the rebirth of bureaucracy. As Castoriadis makes clear in On the Content of Socialism, ‘the realization of socialism on the proletariat’s behalf by any part or bureaucracy whatsoever is an absurdity, a contradiction in terms, a square circle, an underwater bird; socialism is nothing but the masses’ conscious and perpetual self-managerial activity’ (Castoriadis, 1988a: 297). Castoriadis thus remained true to the self-understanding of the founders of the First International of which Marx himself was the leading member. Yet, whereas Bakunin was discussing forms of organisation that were largely embryonic in the middle to late nineteenth century (mass workers parties, large-scale bureaucratisation of public and private institutions etc.), Castoriadis was able to give close consideration to the ways in which such organisations were able to generate new forms of resistance and new sources of hope.

In terms of resistance, a theme of Castoriadis’s writings on bureaucracy was the self-contradiction inherent in the effort to maintain optimum conditions within the constraints of an artificially imposed hierarchy. What becomes evident to Castoriadis is that the new forms of work being generated under modern conditions placed a premium on quasi-autonomous action and creativity, as opposed to the exercise of ‘muscle’ that characterised the work of earlier periods (Castoriadis, 1988a: 298–9; 1988b: 172–81). More was required of people in industrial settings: more initiative, more responsibility and ingenuity. At the same time, however, bureaucratic control became evermore hierarchical and distant, as new levels of command management were added to the old. In this sense Castoriadis went against the grain of the received wisdom which insisted that modernity affirmed the necessity for increased division of labour and thus to increased subordination, hierarchy and differentiation of input and reward. In his characteristically optimistic view bureaucratisation was a mere cover for the annexing of political and economic power to a new elite. If modernisation carried with it an imperative it was a tendency to generalise economic functions and involve the worker to an ever greater degree in key tasks and processes. Ironically such ideas were to become staples of management-speak in the 1970s and 1980s with its talk of ‘flat hierarchies’ and ‘flexible’ working practices. Unlike the management gurus, however, Castoriadis took seriously the possibility of, indeed necessity for, generalised self-management and thus the elimination of any kind of hierarchy or differentiation between members of a given collective. From this point of view his account of justice tends at this point to endorse Proudhon’s conclusions from What is Property? and the view that in a self-managed society there would be little rationale for differentiation of pay (Castoriadis, 1993: 207–15). Since the allocation of tasks and functions would be decided on an egalitarian and democratic basis as opposed to the basis of the market, each and every contribution would be deserving of equal remuneration. Why should those performing one set of tasks not be paid as much as those performing another when in the view of the community each is equally necessary for the well-being of the whole?

Castoriadis’s views on the irrationalities of bureaucratic rule were apparently confirmed by the events of 1956 (Castoriadis, 1988b: 57–89; 1993: 250–71). To the left’s surprise, communism was overthrown in Hungary by the largely spontaneous and unplanned energies of a wide section of the population. Councils were created, decision-making popularised and new procedures instituted that guaranteed widespread participation in all areas of social and economic functioning. Here was a vindication of Castoriadis’s position, one he was never slow to refer to when sceptics doubted the possibility for the kind of self-organisation to which he was dedicated. Hungary announced certain truisms as far as Castoriadis was concerned. The first was the sheer unpredictability of human action, the way it defies pattern or logic. ‘Hungary 1956’ should not have happened. For communists, it was inconceivable that workers should rebel against a workers’ state. For liberals, those rebelling against communism should have rushed into the construction of constitutional arrangements safeguarding those individuals’ liberties and rights so rudely taken away in the communist putsch. The fact that ‘Hungary’ did take place confirmed a basic fact about human action: we create the world and thus we are able to transform our world into a radically different world. The onset of ‘crisis’ does not make for a transformative or radical politics; radical activity by ordinary men and women did.

Secondly, hierarchy and subordination are not more rational under modern conditions as many a pessimistic commentator asserted: they are less so. We should be able to see more clearly than our forebears the mystical basis for elite rule in whatever guise, and thus that whatever obstacles there are to self-management are supported and sustained by human action – not by ‘necessity’ however interpreted. There is no reason why ordinary people cannot be free, which for Castoriadis equates to managing society unaided by priests, monarchs or communist party officials. It is not building new systems that are the key to developing autonomy as a collective project, but participating in processes in which society is reproduced. No amount of tinkering with democratic institutions will make them better if the end product is the representation of people’s needs and interests as opposed to the direct participation of people in the self-management of society. In this sense representation is opposed to autonomy. What the Hungarians seemed clearly to grasp on Castoriadis’s reading is the moment a group annexes governance to something external to self-activity autonomy itself is alienated. In this sense Castoriadis fully endorsed the Bakuninist critique not only of bureaucracy, but of ‘statism’ more generally. The problem was not merely a set of institutions suspended above the social, but the abdication of political creation as a collective activity, as opposed to an activity undertaken by the few whether in trade unions, political parties or society more generally.

The end of Marxism

In his early work Castoriadis’s analysis of contemporary politics is the source of his disappointment with Marxism. Marxism fails in practice, if not in theory. He still evidently hoped, however, that the radical and autonomist politics to which he was attached would re-emerge phoenix-like from organised revolutionary politics to which he himself was dedicated until the disbanding of SOB. From the late 1950s onwards these expectations are progressively displaced in his deepening critique of Marxism. The latter comes increasingly to be regarded by Castoriadis, not merely as a project that failed, but as a position fully implicated in the horrors of twentieth-century despotism. Marxism thus has to be combated not only as a practice, but also as a theory. The major theoretical attack was launched in the work of the late 1950s and in particular in the essay ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’ (1959). The critique culminates in ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’ written in 1964. Castoriadis’s analysis of Marxism is a dense and complicated one operating on a range of levels. Yet there are certain core notions which were to form the basis of his revolt against what he now termed ‘a collective irrational belief’ (Castoriadis, 1988b: 331). The main props of his attack were as follows.

1. As an economic theory Marxism had become redundant. The analysis of the major trends and tendencies of capitalist production were wrong empirically, and this in turn highlighted it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• From Critical Theory to Post-Marxism: An Introduction
• 1 Cornelius Castoriadis: Magmas and Marxism
• 2 Deleuze and Guattari: Rethinking Materialism
• 3 Jean-François Lyotard: From Combat to Conversation
• 4 Laclau and Mouffe: Towards a Radical Democratic Imaginary
• 5 Post-Marxist Feminism: Within and Against Marxism
• 6 Agnes Heller: Radical Humanism and the Postmodern
• 7 Jürgen Habermas: Reconciling Modernity, Autonomy and Solidarity
• 8 Jacques Derrida: Deconstructing Marxism(s)
• 9 Conclusion: Whither Post-Marxism?
• Index